It’s about time: Microsoft launches Office for iPad [Updated]

Update: Indeed, Microsoft launched Office for iPad today, but if you were hoping to pay a small price for standalone apps that would let you create and edit documents, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

Word, Excel and Powerpoint for iPad are available from the iTunes App Store and are free to download, but they’ll only let you access and read existing Office documents. If you want to create and edit them, you’ll need an Office 365 subscription. That’s $99.99 a year for most folks.

With that subscription, you’ll be able to create Office documents with features that come close to matching the capabilities of the full version. They’ll be stored online, so you can work on files on your iPad and come back to them later on a PC, Mac or other supported device. You can read more about its features at this Microsoft Office blog post.

Microsoft isn’t saying so for sure, but the smart money believes the company will – at long last – launch a version of its Office productivity suite for iPad during a press event today.

That the software giant has been working on Office for iPad is not in dispute. Former CEO Steve Ballmer said as much last year, though he insisted it wouldn’t be released until after a more touch-friendly version for Windows 8 was out.

But there’s a new sheriff in town, and current CEO Satya Nadella will be heading up the announcement, which begins at noon CDT today and will be streamedlive from Microsoft’s News Center site. It’s possible that we’ll hear about a new version of Office for the PC, but that would be a surprise.

By finally caving in to the iPad, Microsoft is confronting the reality that has been built by the device, which dramatically changed the computing landscape. PC sales are down, tablet sales are up, and this tectonic shift can be squarely laid at the feet of Apple’s iPad, first unveiled only four years ago.

The article, by Nick Wingfield, points out that Microsoft’s hesitation to offer Office for iPad has given the makers of other productivity titles an opportunity to gain a foothold. Apple, for example, now gives away its iOS version of iWork, and iPad users are now used to getting things done with software other than Office.

But the allure of the iconic Microsoft brand is strong. If the product is priced right, and if it really combines the power of Office with the friendliness of the iOS interface, Microsoft could have a huge hit on its hands. From the Times story:

Rick Sherlund, an analyst with Nomura Securities, says he believes Microsoft could add $1 billion or so of additional revenue from Office for the iPad and other devices that don’t run Windows over the next year or so. While it would take more than that to make a big difference for a company of Microsoft’s size, he said investors believed that Microsoft was showing a greater willingness to create products for other companies’ devices.

Can you expect Office for Android and maybe even Google’s Chrome OS? Maybe not today, but Microsoft’s new CEO appears to be better at reading the writing on the wall than his predecessor.

Welcome to the post-PC era, Microsoft. You may be late to the party, but there will be benefits for just showing up, maybe even a renewed relevance.

Sorry. But I use Open Office now. Almost everything I need to do is on it, it works with everything, I can run it on Linux too, and it’s free. Oh, and unlike Microsoft stuff — it works (not to mention the years it has taken for Microsoft to get around to making a program for the iPad…)

I converted all of my Microsoft Office documents to Apple’s iWork formats (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) a couple years ago. I did this for two reasons:
1/The Office apps have become overly complicated bloatware. The Apple apps are much more intuitive and user friendly. The Office apps are loaded up with features that I’d never use like arrays, table of contents, etc.
2/The Apple Apps sync between my MacBook Pro and my iPad.
I don’t really do much document creation on the iPad. It is more for viewing and editing documents created on the Mac.

If someone sends me a document created in Microsoft Office, for example a Word document, I open it with Pages and save it as a Pages document. I’m a happy camper not having to fuss with the Office apps complexities. In the two years since I stopped using the Office apps, I’ve never encountered a single instance where I needed some feature that was in Office but not in iWorks.

@ lil ol me – For instance, when I receive a word document, I simply drag and drop its icon onto the Pages program Icon and it imports perfectly formatted. If I should edit and then want to send it to someone else in Word format, I just choose the Export in Word format command and it saves it, also perfectly formatted. If you open in Pages and Word side-by-side, you can’t tell the difference.

dave I understand that, but that’s a ‘visual’ equivalent; my Android’s Polaris has that. Format is one thing, functionality is another.

My question is more what (if any) Excel features do you lose when you export it back to Windows/Office? Can you still do macros? hyperlinks? Are the cell formulas intact and editable? This is where most non-Office products fail: altho some of them can do those things well, they do them DIFFERENTLY so when saved, the functionality is lost when reverted to and edited in Office.

For several years I’ve been disappointed with Microsoft (MS) products. MS has continued to make unnecessary changes to their Office Suite in an effort to differentiate itself from the competition. Unfortunately this has been to the detriment of how user-friendly the overall software is perceived by its users. Once the perception of simplicity and logic is lost, normal tasks become unnecessarily complicated.

Makes sense as more IT departments are allowing BYOD. I also agree that the iPad made the tablet prominent. However after getting my hands on a Surface 2 Pro with MS Office I can honestly say its what the iPad could have been.

There’s a big difference between the capabilities of a web app and a native one. There is also are versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote on the Web, but using the app versions is a much better experience.

Charles…you’re talking about the web-based app…which will run in most browsers on most devices with varying degrees of success. Today’s release is a native iOS app that runs on the iPad, not through any browser. There’s a big difference…

Wow. $100/year for a single device – and an iPad to boot? Yea, not interested no matter how good it might be. MS really needs to get off their high horse.

On the plus side, this might push Apple to turn Pages and Numbers into something better, or at least allow you to use the MS Word “format” (it’s apparently not much of a file type as much as it’s a memory dump from what I understand) as the default. “Sharing,” along with selection of which format you want to use is just painful. Hey – maybe access to the file system? Sorry, way off topic there.

After sleeping on it for a while, this might not be a bad deal for some. I’m virulently anti-subscription for software, but if you absolutely need the editing stuff that MS Office offers *and you’ve got multiple computers/handheld devices* then this gets you the software you need for a decent price considering upgrades. Even better if you can get your business to pay for it somehow.

That said, the vast majority of users out there don’t need anything more than a basic text editor and MS Office is more than overkill.